The present invention relates to systems and methods for personal assistance, more specifically, to a system and method for locating and communicating with a person in an emergency.
In recent history, there has been an immense growth in wireless personal communications through systems such as analog cellular, Personal Communications Systems, and Special Mobile Radio. Services implementing such systems operate on band limited frequencies that are licensed for use by the Federal Communications Commission.
Today, there is a great need for low cost, high speed, and accurate systems for summoning and directing assistance to the scene of an emergency from a mobile communication device. For example, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated enhanced 911 capabilities for certain wireless services. Further by way of example, research has shown that a large percentage of buyers and potential buyers of mobile telephones desire to have the telephone only for emergency use. Prior art systems suffer from many drawbacks which make them unsatisfactory for summoning emergency assistance or make them too costly for wide spread public use.
In prior art systems, determining the current location of a mobile subscriber unit for providing emergency assistance is costly, inaccurate, slow, and unreliable. Prior art systems generally locate a mobile subscriber unit using global positioning systems or triangulation of communications signals carrying subscriber voice or data information.
Prior art systems which use a global positioning system for locating a mobile unit suffer from several drawbacks. The mobile subscriber units for such systems are generally expensive and consume significant battery power. Weather or other obstacles may block satellite signals. There is an inherent delay in providing location information to an emergency service provider because the mobile unit must receive and process position signals from global satellites and then transmit the mobile unit's location to a central office for further processing. Location information is not available when the mobile unit is deactivated. Further, global positioning system are generally unreliable or inoperable for determining in-building location.
With triangulation or multilateration of information carrying signals, location information is only available when there is "live" communications from a mobile unit. Prior art multilateration systems such as that offered by Teletrac are not readily adapted to personal locators in that they are expensive, require high transmit power, have short battery life and do not provide voice communication. In addition such systems, either do not offer in-building operation or have poor accuracy in urban situations, particularly when transmission is from the interior of a building.
In systems using the global positioning system or triangulation on the information carrying signal, location information is generally transmitted from the mobile unit to the receive site(s) on a frequency band licensed for subscriber voice or data communication. Bandwidth for personal communications is generally limited. Increasing wireless traffic by including location information decreases the maximum number of concurrent users a system may support thereby decreasing total subscriber revenues of the system.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a novel method and system that overcomes the drawback of the prior art.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a novel personal emergency assistance system that reliably directs service providers to a wireless subscriber.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a novel personal emergency assistance system that can be seamlessly integrated with existing personal communication systems.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a novel method for providing emergency assistance to a wireless mobile telephone subscriber.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a novel personal emergency communication device for directing assistance to a location of an emergency as identified by the user of the device.
These and many other objects and advantages of the present invention will be readily apparent to one skilled in the art to which the invention pertains from a perusal of the claims, the appended drawings, and the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.